Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Holmes & Cook: Monsters

As I've pointed out before, Cook makes a distinction between the monsters in the Expert edition and those found in the Holmes Basic edition:

The monster section has been greatly expanded to include wilderness areas and deeper dungeon levels than were covered in the D&D Basic rules.

Cook also reinforces this distinction by providing two types of No. Appearing — dungeon and wilderness encounters.

Given that Holmes seems to paint a picture of the Dungeon as an otherworldly place that might even spontaneously produce wandering monsters in response to the adventuring parties that delve into its depths, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the monsters found in Holmes that are not found in Cook. Ostensibly, these beasts are primarily dungeon creatures; however, this view is tempered a bit when one looks at the wilderness encounter tables provided by Cook.

Despite this, however, if one eliminates all those monsters used by Cook in his wilderness encounter tables, one is still left with a fascinating list of monsters:

Carrion Crawler

Doppleganger

Gelatinous Cube

Grey Ooze

Green Slime

Giant Tick

Minotaur

Ochre Jelly

Owl Bear

Rust Monster

This list becomes even more fascinating when those monsters from Cook that are not used in his wilderness encounter tables are added (* = are also found in Holmes):

Black Pudding*

Caecilia

Cockatrice*

Cyclops

Elementals (including Djinn and Efreeti)

Golem

Hell Hound*

Invisible Stalker

Purple Worm*

This list can be roughly broken down into three categories:

1. Maintenance/Clean-up Crew

Caecilia

Carrion Crawler

Gelatinous Cube

Grey Ooze

Green Slime

Giant Tick

Ochre Jelly

Purple Worm

Rust Monster

2. Combo Creatures

Cockatrice

Cyclops

Doppleganger

Minotaur

Owl Bear

3. Magical Constructs/Summoned

Elemental

Golem

Hell Hound

Invisible Stalker

Taken together, these monsters playfully suggest an intelligence behind their existence. The Maintenance/Clean-up Crew could be magically created "fire and forget" janitors. The Combo Creatures could be magical experiments. The Magical Constructs/ Summoned creatures most obviously require come kind of magic spell to bring them into existence/this plane. They all also suggest that something went horribly wrong somewhere along the line.

I am inclined to understand this intelligence to be the ancient civilization suggested by Holmes' Wand Spells, Ring Spells and Potion Spells. It gives the Tower of Babel theme a nice Frankenstein's monster vibe. Not only did the ancient humans turn their back on God, they tried to do better than God by trying to become gods themselves. In their delusional pride, their creation turned out to be a monster, which brought the whole civilization crashing down around them.

Using this particular image amplifies Holmes' vision of the Dungeon. It becomes a magical scar left upon creation by those that wished to be gods. It becomes a blight — the ever-changing mother of monsters. I am even tempted to say that ancient magic attracts Dungeon activity. For example, when ancient magic items — even as minor an item as a +1 Sword (Greater) — are successfully removed from the Dungeon, it begins to move towards the item's new home in order to reclaim the ancient magic. This would, in part, explain why the Dungeon has so much magic and treasure buried within and why adventurers are always tempted to delve its depths. It also explains why Zenopus of the sample dungeon in the back of Holmes disappeared 50 years ago and why today there are no stairs that go to deeper depths of the Dungeon. It successfully recovered its magic and has moved on...